The Hydra: Electric Minds NYD with Innervisions & Aus – Dixon, Âme, Move D, Glimpse – Fire, London

NYD is the new NYE as far as I am concerned. Not thrilled with the NYE line-ups, price tags and almost certain overselling of tickets, we opted for a quiet night in with the TV and a bottle of rum. 

NYD we had a lie in whilst most of the world woke up with a hang over. Breakfast and a hop skip and jump to VOID at Café 1001 started our day off in style with a back to back set from Ashley Borg and Ash Verschuur, followed by a few hours of hanging out with mates, chatting music, house prices and who had been awake the longest. We left them to wind down whilst we went home to power up, have dinner, gather friends and hit Fire in Vauxhall for a night of The Hydra.

We arrived at midnight to a fast moving queue under the tunnel at Fire: handy considering the weather, which was decidedly wet and windy. Having ditched coats in the cloakroom, us non-smoking girls went and sat in the warmth of the bar and sofas whilst the lads bumped into mates outside in the cold and wet for a smoke.

The barman we were served by was clearly on the tail end of an epic shift as he filled our beer glasses with ice and had to come back to us in between each ingredient for a vodka lime and soda to check the order. Drinks prices at Fire are neither horrendous nor cheap. They do give you free water at the bar though, which is always a winner. The music in the bar was pumping in from the main room and sounded too good to be missing so, when the lads finally came indoors, we headed in. The last time I was here was for Kompakt and the sound had been so disappointingly quiet that the whole night had been marred and I was worried of a repeat at this event. I needn’t have worried. The sounds of Marcus Worgull filled the main arch with warm, floating on a cloud beats, with lush vocals a plenty, moving into a more upbeat soulful vibe for the last half hour.

The crowd at this party was great. The main room was stupidly hot – we practically had to wring our clothes out when we left. I couldn’t feel a thing coming out of the air conditioning vents but despite this, there was room to dance and a great atmosphere. The event was not over sold. This gives Broken & Uneven a massive star in my book – it’s a rare occurrence these days and makes such a huge difference to an event and the happiness of its crowd. This crowd was generally aged 25-35 years old. Plenty of us “oldies” out for a change, perhaps sensibly deciding that everyone out just to get wasted would have run out of NYE steam by then, and leave some steadfast fans to a great night out. Not to mention the average level of attractiveness in the building was a good 8/10. Worth noting – had a large natural disaster struck the building that night it would have been an epic detriment to the UK beauty gene pool. Girls and boys alike just all looking fabulous. Maybe it was the huge smiles on everyone’s faces and the total relaxation of there not being a bad bit of attitude from anyone in the whole place. It was bliss.

Fire’s huge covered outside space, complete with booths bars and plants, made a pleasant respite from the heat of indoors – despite the appalling monsoon conditions out there.

Back into the Innervisions room where the heat and crowd was almost too much to cope with as the DJs swapped over and people moved around a lot. It’s not the best venue for traffic flow and it never helps when one huge conga of people after another, all holding hands like little kids on a school trip, try to squeeze past you. 

Mano Le Tough delivered a sleazy sexy deep house set: chugging bass lines, deep electro vocals, a touch of techno, a touch of house and a sumptuous feast of sounds. We danced until we could take the heat no more and got off the dance floor. A quick loo break (clean, dimly lit and mostly missing seats in the ladies. Not the best but by no means the worst toilets in Clubland) and cool down outside and we moved into The Lightbox to join Electric Minds for Move D’s set.

Move D opened his set with Gabrielle by Roy Davis and the LEDs of the light box were definitely a great visual aid to what was a classic house Move D set. It’s impossible to immerse yourself in anything other than a party vibe with those lights – the music delivered the perfect accompaniment. We didn’t stick around for the entire set, as my main reason for coming was to see Âme and Dixon. I last saw them at Berghain in 2012 and missed their UK dates in 2013.

It was worth toughing out the heat for. If a picture says a thousand words, then the final set from Âme and Dixon was this, only replace the flames with glitter and the gun with a water pistol. 

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